ill

adj

1. (obsolete)Evil; wicked (of people).

   “St. Paul chose to magnify his office when ill men conspired to lessen it.”

   “A man who is conscious of having an ill character, cannot justly be angry with those who neglect and slight him.”

2. (archaic)Morally reprehensible (of behaviour etc.); blameworthy.

   “‘Go bring her. It is ill to keep a lady waiting.’”

3. Indicative of unkind or malevolent intentions; harsh, cruel.

   “He suffered from ill treatment.”

4. Unpropitious, unkind, faulty, not up to reasonable standard.

   “ill manners; ill will”

   “[…]his lordship was out of humour. That was the way Chollacombe described as knaggy an old gager as ever Charles had had the ill-fortune to serve. Stiff-rumped, that's what he was, always rubbing the rust, or riding grub, like he had been for months past.”

5. Unwell in terms of health or physical condition; sick.

   “mentally ill people”

   “I've been ill with the flu for the past few days.”

   ““We desperately needed the nursing support because our ICUs are so inundated with critically ill Covid patients,” Brown said.”

6. Nauseated; having an urge to vomit.

   “Seeing those pictures made me ill.”

7. (slang)Sublime, with the connotation of being so in a singularly creative way.

   “This is the illest beat I've ever heard.”

   “Biggie Smalls is the illest / Your style is played out, like Arnold wonderin "Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?"”

8. (slang)Extremely bad (bad enough to make one ill). Generally used indirectly with to be.

   “That band was ill.”

9. (dated)Unwise; not a good idea.

   “Oh that when the devil and flesh entice the sinner to sport with and make a mock of sin, Prov. x. 23, he would but consider, it is ill jesting with edged tools, it is ill jesting with unquenchable burnings; […]”

   “They arrested everybody—and it is ill to resist a drunken Tommy with a loaded rifle!”

10. (Appalachia)Bad-tempered.

adv

1. Not well; imperfectly, badly

   “Such jealousy ill becomes her; she can ill afford another gaffe like that.”

   “He would have conversed as usual; but his attempts were so ill seconded, that he was fain to take refuge in the letters that lay beside him.”

   “Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The slowly changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and ill-fitted.”

   “In both groups, however, we find copious and intricate speciation so that, often, species limits are narrow and ill defined.”

   “His inflexibility and blindness ill become a leader, for a leader must temper justice with mercy.”

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Trouble; distress; misfortune; adversity.

   “Music won't solve all the world's ills, but it can make them easier to bear.”

   “That makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of.”

   “Then he commenced to talk, really talk. and inside of two flaps of a herring's fin he had me mesmerized, like Eben Holt's boy at the town hall show. He talked about the ills of humanity, and the glories of health and Nature and service and land knows what all.”

2. (countable, uncountable)Harm or injury.

   “I wouldn't want you to do me ill.”

   “Loue worketh no ill to his neighbour, therefore loue is the fulfilling of the Law.”

3. (countable, uncountable)Evil; moral wrongfulness.

   “Strong virtue, like strong nature, struggles still, / Exerts itself, and then throws off the ill.”

4. (countable, uncountable)A physical ailment; an illness.

   “I am incapacitated by rheumatism and other ills.”

5. (US, slang, uncountable)PCP, phencyclidine.
6. (abbreviation, alt-of, initialism)Initialism of interlibrary loan.

verb

1. (dated, intransitive, slang)To behave aggressively.

   “D.M.C.: You been illin' lately. Run: So, I'm illin'. Am I illin'? Chillin'! You know what I'm sayin'? Chillin'.”

name

1. A river in France, tributary to the Rhine.